Is there a possibility to download the VM and Managed Disks snapshots from certain point of time to local computer without restoring it?
Example 1 (VM):
Azure portal -> Virtual Machines -> my-vm -> Backup
There I can see the snapshots that I can restore to another VM, but can I download them anyhow?
Example 2 (Managed disks - OS and Data):
I see options to stop VM and download VHD, but it will have the current state, not the certain point of time in the past.
Related
I have a couple of VMs that I want to backup and restore easily and often. Preferably as a group.
I have tried default Azure backup and restore but noticed that it doesn't seem to do much. It is easy to create and schedule backups but it is not clear to me how these backups can be used to bring a VM back to its original state.
The use cases for the default backup / restore seem to be very different from what I expected. I expected something somewhat similar to VirtualBox: take a snapshot and then restore takes the VM back to the snapshot.
Restore of VM in Azure does not seem to be a supported use case. I think the idea is more to clone / duplicate the machine.
The default "restore" is a feature to create another VM because it you try to restore Azure shows an error message
A virtual machine with the same already exists in the selected resource group. Please change the virtual machine name or select a new resource group.
There is an option to restore disks. This seems to work at first. Restore job completes successfully but nothing it restored. The file system is the same as before restore.
There is no detailed log so there is no way to determine what is happening. There is only exit status: success restore completed successfully.
Are there other ways to mimic VirtualBox functionality? Take snapshots and restore VM's using such snapshots?
Does MS have plans to enhance backup in such way that it also supports restore?
Snapshot works by capturing image state of a virtual machine. In Azure, you can snapshot your VHD and restore that snapshot whenever you'd like. Get started with snapshot here https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/windows/snapshot-copy-managed-disk
Disk snapshot works best in case your virtual machine uses one disk (for the OS). Or if that virtual machine has more than one disk, disk snapshot is still useful, but takes time and may result disk management overhead. In that case, you could go with image generalization to capturing the whole virtual machine's state at once using tool like sysprep (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/windows/capture-image-resource)
From your screenshot, the problem is exactly what is highlighted in red. You cannot overwrite your virtual machine to the existing one in the same resource group. You must restore it somewhere else.
Azure Site Recovery and Backup is designed to work with large deployment of virtual machines, with some capabilities of automation and disaster recovery.
I'm a lone dev that inherited a giant undocumented mess of an azure vm without any sysadmin-like training nor a lab to test things out. This vm runs our website just fine, but I couldn't log in to VestaCp because disk space usage is at 100%.
I did setup azure to make daily backups. Now I'm wondering if azure somehow stores them on the same machine e.g. they're the cause of the full disk space.
if so, how do I remove a set of old backups?
Now I'm wondering if azure somehow stores them on the same machine e.g. they're the cause of the full disk space.
As mentioned in the official document about creating a recovery services vault for a VM:
The location of Recovery Services vault determines the geographic region where your backup data is sent.
If you have virtual machines in multiple regions, create a Recovery Services vault in each region.
There is no need to specify the storage accounts used to store the backup data--the Recovery Services vault and the Azure Backup service automatically handle the storage.
Per my understanding, your VM backup data could be stored on the storage accounts that are managed automatically by the Recovery Services vault (ARM) and the Azure Backup service (ASM).
Moreover, if this issue could not be solved by removing a set of old backups, I assumed that you could follow this tutorial to resize Azure VM OS or Data Disk created using Azure Service Manager (ASM) or this tutorial for resizing ARM VM OS & Data disk.
When creating the VM I'm asked about Storage configuration. When I select IOPS=0 (the minimum is otherwise 5000), Throughput=0 and Storage size=0, the info text is
0 data disks will be added to the virtual machine. This value was computed based on the value of IOPS, throughput, and storage size.
When the VM is created and I go to the Storage account, select Blobs and Container named vhds I see two disks, one 127GB and one 1TB disk.
Since the 1TB premium disks costs >100€/month I don't want that.
I tried removing the disk from a created machine but when I tried to add a new I got the error that "LUN :0 is already in use".
Preferably I would like to create machine correctly from the start. How can I do that?
This is correct. The current SQL Server IaaS experience on Azure Portal would creates one disk of 1TB even if specify 0 IOPS. We will add a fix to ensure the user cannot specify IOPS below 1 TB disk. If you need SQLVM without disks or any other configurations, you may use Azure PowerShell to create the VM.
Will my files and database will be lost if I stop or restart or my VM get crashed certainly.
Can the files created at VM be stored in my computer hard disk so that I can retrieve them in future, if I need.
If your VM get crashed you will not be able to access your VM as well as your data but that doesn't mean you will loss your data. Your data will be stored there in the blob storage.
What you need to do is- attach the blob storage properly to some other vm or new vm to access it again.
As previously mentioned this was answered on another thread, the best thing to do is to download the VHD locally.
From the Windows Azure Portal you can easily download the VHD. Just navigate to STORAGE and then the storage account in which your virtual disk is created. Select CONTAINERS (at the top), open the container named "vhds". Just click the vhd you want and select DOWNLOAD (at the bottom of the page).
Have a great day
Could someone please help me understand this? I created Virtual Machine in Azure running Windows Server 2012. I noticed Azure created a storage account automatically. When I go inside that storage account, click Containers tab, and under vhds name it shows a name-name2-2014-12-05.vhd which is 127 GB and it always has recent Last modified date. What is that for? Is that my live backup image of my entire server deployment? If so where can I see how often it backs up?
When I go inside that storage account, click Containers tab, and under
vhds name it shows a name-name2-2014-12-05.vhd which is 127 GB and it
always has recent Last modified date. What is that for?
Virtual Machines in Azure are Stateful in nature. What that means is that any changes you make to the Virtual Machines like installing software, creating files etc. are persisted. The way Azure achieves this is by storing the Virtual Machine VHD as a page blob in Azure Storage. What you see as name-name2-2014-12-05.vhd is the VHD using which Azure launches your VM.
Is that my live backup image of my entire server deployment?
It is your VM and not the backup image. If by mistake you delete it (though Azure makes it real hard for you to delete it but its possible), your VM is gone. If you want, you can take a backup of this and store it in some other place. Search for Create Azure Virtual Machine Images and you will find ample resources.
If so where can I see how often it backs up?
By default Azure keeps 2 extra copies (a total of 3 including the main) of it in the data center and if you have enabled geo-redundancy, then Azure keeps additional 3 copies in a separate datacenter. However please keep in mind that it is not a backup. Any changes you make to your VM are replicated to all the copies. You would need to come up with your backup approach.
My recommendation would be to read more about Azure Virtual Machines. I'm sure if you search for it, you will get plentiful of resources.